An Oregon magazine cover we'd rather cover up

This holiday season, Andrew Eichstadt, holding a can of vegetables and gazing back into the camera with a 3-year-old's wonder at it all, is the face of Oregon children.

Actually, to much of the country, he's the face of Oregon.

Every year, Parade magazine, distributed in more than 600 Sunday newspapers with a total circulation of 32 million, proposes socially useful things to do during this season. This year's story ran in the Nov. 27 issue, and as usual, most of the 10 suggestions could be followed anywhere around the country, such as "Help a Needy Family Meet Their Mortgage" or "Keep a Home Warm This Winter."

Then there was suggestion No. 2, the one that got Andrew Eichstadt on the cover: "Feed Hungry Children in Oregon."

In Oregon.

You'd like to think a sentence like that might end, "in Somalia."

Oregon achieved this humiliating cover boy status after a Feeding America report in September, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture surveys, found that Oregon had the highest rate of child food insecurity of any state, a cupboards-empty 29.2 percent. It was bolstered by the Oregon Food Bank backing food pantries in six Portland-area schools, including Kelly in outer Southeast Portland, where Parade found Andrew Eichstadt over by the canned goods.

It spurred a response.

"The outpouring of support from across the country has been tremendous," said Ellen Dully, associate director of development at the Oregon Food Bank. "We have received donations from nearly all 50 states, including a few donors from as far away as Alaska and Hawaii." In the spike in donations after Parade appeared, OFB staff identified 660 contributions, totaling about $38,000, as likely due to the magazine story.

Which helps, even if it feels a little like the money came in because Oregon's hungry kids were out on the nation's streets holding a hat. One contributor from Georgia said he'd always enjoyed coming here for Cycle Oregon and was shocked to hear what Oregon's child food insecurity numbers were like.

That visitor reaction won't make it into a state tourism brochure.

A U.S. Conference of Mayors report released Thursday featured this news from Portland: "For the next year, city officials expect requests for food assistance to increase substantially but resources to provide food assistance to decrease substantially. In the face of increasing requests ... local officials see maintaining the food supply as the biggest challenge they will face during the next year."

We could end up on more magazine covers, again for the wrong reasons.

"The important thing is not to obsess about being the worst, but to see it used as a call to arms," argues Jim Weill, president of the Food Research Action Center in Washington, D.C., who can stay hopeful despite being surrounded by numbers like this from all around the country. "The state has in the past done a great job at bringing its hunger numbers down, and it can do it again."

What's moved numbers in the past has been a combination of commitments by individual Oregonians, of moving local businesses and institutions to take up the challenge, and of working to get the most possible help out of every federal food program.

Susan Stoltenberg, executive director of ImpactNW, which runs the food Pantry at Kelly School, sees locals rising to meet the crisis: "Schools have community gardens, and we see lots of volunteers who want to work in summer food programs."

It's a situation, and an image, that can bring Oregonians together: "People can argue about who should get public assistance, or how much they should get, but nobody thinks kids shouldn't be fed," says Stoltenberg. "It's a real flag for communities to rally around."

Deep into the food barrel, there may be a faint gleam of light, desperately needed in this darkest winter. Because in all the 12 million cover photos of Andrew Eichstadt circulating all across the country, there's just one message in his 3-year-old eyes: